


Once Upon a December

by reylo_garbagecan



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: Alternate Universe - Russia, Anastasia AU, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Balekin is like an evil Grandmama, Con Artist Jude, Con Artist Roach, F/M, Lost Prince Cardan, POV Cardan Greenbriar, POV Jude Duarte, the movie version not the play
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,391
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23101765
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/reylo_garbagecan/pseuds/reylo_garbagecan
Summary: “He’s perfect, Jude,” the Roach spoke in a hushed tone against her ear, and her eyes widened. Oh.The boy had the lost prince’s raven hair, curled lightly in locks across his forehead and at the tops of his ears. His facial features had the pointed distinctiveness of the Greenbriars, and his eyes were nearly black like the late tsarina’s were. As a whole, he bore a striking resemblance to the only living tsarevich, Balekin. He was perfect, and he was drunk.“I’d like to make you a business proposition,” Jude said at last.
Relationships: Jude Duarte/Cardan Greenbriar
Comments: 7
Kudos: 60





	Once Upon a December

**Author's Note:**

> This was literally a crack thing that I shared on tumblr and I carried way out of hand and now it's a full blown fic, so, here we are lol, but I'm excited to write it all the same. One announcement to make is that I have not tried at all in the slightest to make their names seemed traditionally Russian so, rather than the Romanovs we have the very Russian (sarcasm) Greenbriars, and that's just going to be the way it is :') 
> 
> Leave a comment, I love hearing what everyone thinks! 
> 
> Side note: let's play a game and see if I can stick to the chapter count or go over...while we're at it, see if I can stick to that rating too

Someone cared about Cardan—Cardan No Last Name and no family to vouch for him. He could feel it. Every night in his dreams there was _someone_ there. Someone who looked like him. Cardan wasn’t sure if that was what the man really looked like or if the porcelain skin, raven hair, and pointed features were only his subconscious’ reconstruction of what his family _might_ look like. The voice though, he knew, the voice was someone who cared about him, someone who knew him once. There was a vague notion of a voice calling him ‘little brother,’ but it was always faint.

 _Little brother, where have you gone,_ an echo of the past called out to him, faceless this time, somewhere behind him and far away.

To the eyes of the boys who slept near him in the orphanage, he tossed his head to the side feverishly. In his dream—his echoes, he preferred to term them—he whirled around to face the man who called him brother in the midst of a snowstorm. The vague shapes of towers loomed over them in what looked to be an abandoned courtyard, all the wishful imaginings of a boy who grew up with nothing. The man’s face was vague too like the towers, not in such that Cardan could not see his face, but when he tried to focus on any particular facet of his features, everything else started to blur away. He blinked snow from his eyelashes, and, for some reason, he felt fear. His mouth opened to speak, but the cold choked his words.

A smirk slid onto the man’s face and the point of a sharp canine only just peeked through his thin lip, the rest of his face blurred itself obscure to Cardan’s eyes. Though his mouth did not move from the smirk, his voice was clear over the howling of the wind. _You’ve run away, little mouse, but I will find you eventually._

The snow stung his eyes and brought burning tears as he squinted to see through the swirling mass of flakes. _I didn’t run away_ , he though obstinately yet with truth. He did not run away to his knowledge—knowledge of his young life which was, admittedly, very limited—and he could not believe that his deepest wish for a family who cared for him could have come from running from them. The man heard his thoughts reaching across the space between them.

_You did._

_Find me, I want you to find me_ , Cardan tossed once again on the unforgiving and unwashed mattress. Sweat beaded on his brow despite his dreams of frost, and several boys around him were startled awake by his sleep-addled mumbling and groaning.

 _Eventually, little mouse, I will catch you_ , Cardan shivered at the ominous sounding tone of the man’s voice. At once he was both frightened of him but also…he was looking for him. His brother? Somewhere he had a brother, he was sure of it.

A sharp pain stabbed at his shoulder, and he jolted awake in bed, clutching his shoulder with a cry dying on his sharp bursts of breath. One of the orphanage boys was pulling back his closed fist from where, Cardan could only assume, he had struck him to wake him from his echoes. The _сестра-хозяйка_ loomed over the end of his bed, not dissimilar from the towers of the courtyard with her hands on her hips and a grim knit to her usually grim expression beneath her religious habit.

Cardan rubbed the remnant of sweat and perhaps even tears, though he wouldn’t admit it, from his face and tried to speak, “ _Matrona_ —”

“ _С_ _Дн_ _ë_ _м_ _рождения_ , mister Cardan,” she snarled his name with a sardonic sneer. His heart fluttered in his chest at her words, though he knew she did not wish him a good birthday because she celebrated—no, he was eighteen, and he had aged out of her orphanage. Nerves and anticipation and fear made his hands tremble. On his own, no one telling him what to do, but no one there to offer him help any longer.

“Thank you, _matrona_ ,” he lowered his head both in deference and also so she could not see his thinkings and machinations that she so often fussed at him for when she could see them so plainly in his eyes.

Her cold, gnarled fingers gripped his chin, unclipped nails sharp against his skin, to tilt his face so her eyes might look into his. Cardan dearly hoped she could not see how his eyes were drawn as if by magnetic force to look into the mole placed squarely between her eyebrows as if by God with a sense of humor. Some mischief was detected because she chucked him under the chin and harrumphed.

“This is it, mister Cardan. No more of your _echoes_ waking me up at indecent hours. I expect to see you dressed and packed downstairs. I give you minutes.”

She left in a flurry of somber swaths of black cloth, and Cardan scrambled from bed. Dawn was peeking through the thick drapes, and the younger boys around him were glaring as he stomped and threw his meager belongings into his rucksack. Some of their eyes were pinched shut as if they were sleeping to spite his racket, and he could not withhold a fond smile. Not one of them would miss his noisemaking in the night, but he could see himself missing their constant ire. Attention was attention, beggars could not be choosers, and Cardan had always been a beggar—that he could remember at least.

Packing took little time as he had generally little to pack, warm layers of clothing mostly. He presented himself before his caretaker of nearly a decade, and she crossed her arms.

“Goodbye, I suppose then, _matrona_ ,” he muttered at his feet after she did not speak.

“What does mister Cardan have planned for himself now, hm?” She spoke at last, and he could almost trick himself into believing that she cared about where he went after he no longer required bread from her table.

A hapless shrug and, “I thought I might go to St. Petersburg and look for my family.”

The _matrona_ was not pleased, “You will do no such thing.”

“Why not?” He could not help the annoyance from creeping into his tone, which she was equally displeased about.

Her hands grabbed his collar, and he did his best not to flinch, but she only unfolded it to cover his cheeks from the cold he was about to walk into, and she tutted with all seriousness in her thick Moscovian accent, “Do not say I do nothing for you. I get you respectable job in next town. Ice fishing, mister Cardan.”

“ _Ice fishing_ ,” he reeled away from her hands, his voice doing nothing to hide his distaste.

She rolled her eyes, “Ungrateful brat, yes! Ice fishing! It is respectable work, especially for a little scoundrel like you!”

Her finger gave a sharp poke to his chest, and Cardan batted her hand away, feeling his frustration spike. Without another word to her, he swung the door to the orphanage open and fled through it. The rush of cold wind that hit him in the early hours of morning stung every bit of exposed skin just like the snowstorm from his dream had, but rather than giving him fear, a rush of relief washed over his shoulders. Though the sharp inhale of dry, bitter cold made him cough, the urge to breath in deep as freedom at last wrapped him up was inescapable. Teeth freezing as he did so, he laughed like a wild person and stretched his legs to run himself out of the driveway of the prison he had known for ten years.

The _matrona_ was yelling after him, something about a foolish boy, and something about not having the decency to thank her for putting food in his ungrateful belly for ten years. Cardan kept running until her voice died out, until his lungs were the only ones yelling at him to stop, and until he came to a fork in the road. The nearby fishing village to his left and the longer road to St. Petersburg to the right. The fishing village was safe, and Cardan’s heart stuttered at the thought of having to make his first real decision as a man in charge of himself.

While perhaps not the kindest person in his weary life, she had been right when she said she looked out for him. She did not have to get a job secured for him, and the gratefulness that Cardan had not expressed to her face soured in his mouth. Physically, it hurt to feel anything similar to being grateful when all she had ever thought him capable of was becoming even more of a scoundrel without her there to constantly check him. It hurt to feel that for a person to whom he had expressed his hopes and dreams to find his family multiple times, and for that person to also be the one to tell him they were the foolish whims of a child. She’d always told him that he was simple-minded and could never make his way in the world because he could not remember his life before the age of eight—how that was his fault, he was unsure. Yet, she cared enough about him to find him a way to earn a living.

Cardan breathed in deep and let the hurt and frustration of ten years leave him for good—or until another challenge would force it back to his mind. The _matrona_ would never talk down to him again. Plenty more people would, and perhaps his reaction to it would still lead to a shortage in bread on his plate, but at least he would be free to talk back as he pleased. His toes pointed to the right.

* * *

_“We'll find a man to play the part and teach him what to say_

_Dress him up and take him to Paree!_

_Imagine the reward his dear older brother will pay_

_Who else could pull it off but you and me?_

_We'll be rich_

_We'll be out_

_And St. Petersburg will have some more to talk about”_

* * *

_One Year Later_

Jude was at her wits end. The auditions to be the lost prince of Russia were failing spectacularly. When the news had been sent from Paris that the former prince of Tsarist Russia, Balekin, was looking for his long, lost brother—whom he believed to still be alive following the Bolshevik takeover—it was an opportunity she had not been able to pass up. _Ten million rubles_. Jude had enough experience conning to do what needed to be done and even her closest friend and fellow conman was a former courtier in the Tsarist court—she had an _in._ The unfortunate issue was that though she was a phenomenal actress to get what she needed to, the men of St. Petersburg were decidedly not so.

It was not even that they didn’t even look like the lost prince—which they did not; not one of them bore the slightest believable resemblance to a member of the royal Greenbriar line—but they were the most abysmal actors she had ever seen. Sure, maybe they weren’t all con artists—kiosk attendants and fish marketers and scoundrels—that she could have accepted. They could learn, or so she had thought. They could not, she thought as she watched a pot-bellied, older man hack up soot-colored snot after inhaling a cigar and announce he was auditioning for the lost prince.

“Dismissed,” was her tight-lipped response, and out walked the last of the line of actors they had started with days ago.

Her partner-in-con looked over at her from the corner of his eye. The Roach was not a nice man to look at—hell, that’s why he was called the Roach, his real name was lost somewhere in the Revolution—with his exaggerated hooked nose and mean, mug expression. Something about him looked like he was a vicious bastard, but Jude had learned that that was not so. Occasionally gruff, he may have been, but he looked out for her when she was a kid, and he still looked out for when she grew up (a taller kid, he liked to joke). Sometimes, he was even funny. His painted-on scowl turned into a sly smirk.

“Maybe you could consider cutting your hair,” he joked. Sometimes, he _tried_ to be funny.

Jude huffed, unable to hide the disappointment that was beginning to become crushing, “The prince’s hair is black.”

His eyebrows rose in further mockery, “So you _have_ considered it?”

“Sometimes I consider what it would be like to be a man, sure. Equal rights would be swell,” she crossed her arms, “unfortunately, my foolish feminine hopes would not be enough to convince Prince Balekin that _I’m_ his lost younger brother.”

The Roach stood up and jerked his head in the direction of the auditorium’s exit. He did not do her the dishonor of helping her stand as he had tried to do many years ago when he still had the mentality of a courtier, but Jude had never been that sort of woman. She was a commoner, a bottom-feeder, descended from serfdom. No one helped ladies like her stand to their feet, and she would not expect them to nor would she wish for them to. They headed out together and Jude shivered against the way the wind tore through the holes in her _palto._

The Roach threw an arm around his comrade as they walked together, weaving through the stalls and kiosks of St. Petersburg, and he insisted, “Have a drink with me, Jude.”

“If you insist,” Jude shivered out, thinking perhaps some strong vodka would warm the blood in her freezing veins.

She was not ever one to frequent the bars. Bars after dark for a woman with the eyes of lecherous men on her was not her ideal night out. Usually, she reserved nights for holing up in her makeshift office in the abandoned Winter Palace and penning forgery notes for her clients. She was rather talented at that. However, the frustration and disappointment as well as the Roach’s face that was sure to ward off any unwanted attention, Jude thought a drink or two would suffice.

The Roach led her through alleys and people selling them bags of sand as bags of rice and the occasional wandering Bolshevik foot soldier to his bar of choice. He, too, was not a frequent drinker, but he recommended himself to Jude often for his taste in good, strong liquor.

By the time they walked in, the patrons had already gone into full-swing drunkenness. Men sat on stools laughed boisterously, there was live music coming from where Jude could not see, and a group of younger men were dancing raucously on several tables pushed together. The Roach chuffed, and Jude could not tell if he was amused or not by the display of carefreeness. He dropped his arm from around her and motioned to a table in a corner secluded from a fair bit of the rowdy crowd. Alas, as she made her way behind him, they did have to pass the table of dancers.

It happened in slow motion. One moment, Jude was stoically not looking at her surroundings so as not to attract any unwanted attention, and the next, she was turned to fully face a boy on the table, no older than herself, stumble at the edge closest to her and start to tip backwards. Had she not been fearing for her life, she may have laughed at his stupidity and the way his arms flailed about as he tried to catch his balance in vain. Instead, her heart stopped in her chest, yet she was simultaneously incensed at the way he gave a careless giggle as he tipped backwards and on top of her. The crowd parted to make way for their tangle of limbs, and Jude’s face felt hot as the Roach and the rest of the bar looked down at her beneath a squirming and giggling man-child. She gave a rough shove to whatever surface area she could and gave a distasteful scoff.

“Get off of me!”

The boy figured out where his leg was hooked and tangled to hers and rolled off of her, still laughing, “Apologies, miss.”

He sounded anything but apologetic, sitting up and stifling laughter to himself beneath the gazes of the rest of the bar patrons. Jude fumed and looked up at the Roach, who was equally hiding his chuckles. She brushed off the hand of a man in the crowd, stood herself up, and looked down on the boy who fell on her, limbs still sprawled on the floor. There was _something_ about him that made her _not_ want to turn away in disgust and forget about him entirely.

“He’s perfect, Jude,” the Roach spoke in a hushed tone against her ear, and her eyes widened. _Oh._

The boy had the lost prince’s raven hair, curled lightly in locks across his forehead and at the tops of his ears. His facial features had the pointed distinctiveness of the Greenbriars, and his eyes were nearly black like the late tsarina’s were. As a whole, he bore a striking resemblance to the living tsarevich, Balekin. He _was_ perfect, and he was _drunk._

“I’d like to make you a business proposition,” Jude said at last, most of the patrons having already turned back to their drinks and more exciting rumors.

The prince lookalike snorted and swayed himself to his feet, “Is that what you say to all the men who fall off of tables and onto you?”

“No,” she clipped.

“Nice try,” he gave a devilish smirk, not even slightly dulled by his obvious intoxication, “I know better than to expect _business propositions_ in this town. However, I will buy you a drink for your troubles—”

“You will do no such thing, boy, until you’ve payed your tab,” the owner of the bar had seemed to push his way to wherever the commotion had occurred. “I gave you a week, and still you have the nerve to drink yourself into a stupor. Do you think you get to do that _for free_?”

“Nothing is free here,” the man smiled at the glowering man, “not even my delightful presence in your establishment.”

A small growl worked its way up the owner’s throat, “I will have you turned in to the—”

“No need,” the Roach interrupted and pulled out a wad of rubles, “will this cover this young man’s tab?”

“It would,” and the man reached to take it, but the Roach held the money to his chest with a smirk.

“Not so fast,” he turned his smirk to the suddenly silent young man in question, “I will pay your charges if you follow my comrade and I to the palace and listen to her business proposition that I assure you she makes in honest faith.”

“ _Honest faith?_ In St. Petersburg?”

“That’s right,” Jude widened her eyes to look more innocent. “Something potentially mutually beneficial. A little for you, a little for me and my friend here. Afterwards, you won’t need complete strangers to pay off your tab.”

The man’s eyes darkened imperceptibly, but nonetheless he gave a skeptical nod, and the Roach slapped the rubles into the waiting palm of the owner. Jude knew, of course, they were counterfeit rubles, but by the time the owner would realize it and think of reporting a man with such a recognizable face as the Roach, they’d be halfway to Paris. The drunkard gave one last mournful look to what appeared to be a half-full tankard, but with one sharp point from the Roach to the door, all thoughts of drinking were gone from the sudden trio’s minds.

“What’s your name?” Jude managed to wrangle through her chattering teeth on their way back home.

“Cardan.”

The Roach snorted, very amused this time, “Family name?”

The man’s eyes flickered downcast before hardening, and he straightened his stare and set his shoulders, “I don’t have one.”

“Well aren’t you a gem,” the Roach’s eyes glittered mischievously as he shared a look with Jude.


End file.
